


How to Break a Curse

by psocoptera



Category: Fence (Comics)
Genre: M/M, boys being dumb, boys being mean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:07:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21786457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: Seiji definitely isn't doing any ridiculous curse-breaking ritual.
Relationships: Nicholas Cox/Seiji Katayama
Comments: 11
Kudos: 69
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	How to Break a Curse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nitpickyabouttrains](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nitpickyabouttrains/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide nitpickyabouttrains! I love Fence, and these guys were fun to play with.
> 
> Thanks to my betas Carpenter and Irilyth for your help, and to another friend for brainstorming assistance.

"I'm not doing this," Seiji says. He crosses his arms.

"Do we need to review the evidence?" Tanner asks. "Item one, do you deny that half the electronics in the salle are on the fritz. Two, that Castello hasn't had hot water the last three mornings. Three, that Aiden has a disgusting cold. Four, an open bottle of pomegranate juice got dumped into Kally's bag, staining his jacket."

Tanner is pacing back and forth on the clubhouse rug; Kally, on the sofa between Harvard and Eugene, shakes his head sadly. Aiden, exiled to the armchair, blows his nose in punctuation.

"Five," Tanner goes on, "That Blackboard ate your captain's English paper and our teacher won't waive the late penalty. Six, that your teammate Eugene has been tragically injured." He pauses. "Seven and eight, spiderweb and spider in Aiden's mask."

"Should that really count as two?" Nicholas asks from his perch on the arm of the sofa.

"He screamed twice," Tanner says grimly. "Oh, and! Coach Lewis's glasses!"

Seiji taps his toes. He has homework in four classes, but, no, they dragged him out here for this.

"Those are all coincidences," he says. "It's two machines, they're working on the boiler, Eugene got hurt playing soccer, Aiden wouldn't have spiders in his mask if he would pick it up and practice in it, and he wouldn't catch colds if he kept his mouth to him- "

"Hey," Harvard interrupts.

"I am sorry to hear about your English paper," Seiji tells him. "You should argue with your teacher." He turns to Kally. "Have you tried OxiClean?"

"Yeah, I - " Kally starts.

"Not the point!" Tanner yells. "The point, Seiji, is that, yes, any one of these things could just be bad luck. But when the whole team has bad luck, that's something else. That's a curse. And we know what you did."

"This is ridiculous," Seiji says. "I didn't do anything wrong."

"Nobody's saying you did anything on purpose," Nicholas says, leaning forward. "But this cursebreaking thing doesn't sound so bad. Why not just get it over with, huh?"

For some reason his earnest eyes and encouraging smile - he's trying to be _kind_ \- are the least sufferable part of this whole insufferable affair. Seiji's mood goes from impatient to furious.

"There is no such thing as a curse!" He's about ready to stomp out and head back to campus alone, but Harvard starts talking.

"I know we can't prove it," Harvard says. "But everyone's fencing is suffering, and anyone applying early decision has college applications due soon. This isn't a good time to be under a shadow. And traditions are important."

Seiji can feel himself softening - Harvard sounds so reasonable - and then he looks over at Nicholas, who has his hand on Eugene's shoulder, just below the strap of his sling.

"I can't believe you're acting like I'm the weakest link of this team," he snaps.

Harvard sighs. "I hate to say this," he says. "But... maybe you should take a break."

Tanner steps up to him aggressively, jutting his chin into Seiji's personal space. "What Harvard means is that until you agree to get rid of the curse, nobody is going to practice with you, sit with you, talk to you - "

"Um," Nicholas says. "He's kind of my roommate, how am I supposed to - "

Seiji has had enough. "It sounds very restful," he says, and gives in to the temptation to leave.

*

The whole thing is absurd. From Seiji's point of view, what happened looks like this: they were at the Old Heads' Dinner, a meaningless tri-school tri-event tournament with a misleading name, and some kid Seiji didn't know came running up to him and asked if he could give something to Harvard for him. Seiji, appropriately cautious, asked "what is it?" and the kid shoved a pair of fancy metal curvy things at him and took off. Seiji put them in his bag and forgot about them, having a tournament to fence: 5 point/3 minute matches round robin, like a preliminary round of something real, so he got to face all three members of each of the other two teams, only none of them were challenging at all, and only Eugene, from their team, lost any of his matches. (Aiden had traveled to the host school with them, but went mysteriously missing not long after they got there.) Seiji had been mulling the question of whether Nicholas could have defeated Eugene's victorious opponent when there was a big fuss, and it turned out that the winning debate team was supposed to get the handles of the Squire's Urn for the year, which turned out to be the metal things in Seiji's bag, and it was unforgivably taboo for him to have touched them, given that he didn't do debate and Kings Row hadn't won.

From Harvard's point of view, it had looked something like "why would you take something from Lakeside, weren't you listening when I explained they always try to rattle us and St. Jake's." Seiji absolutely hadn't been listening - he had tuned out somewhere around the part where the school with the winning fencing team got the urn, but the school with the winning chess team got the _lid_ of the urn, concluding that nothing about this was relevant to him in any way - but Harvard hadn't appreciated his admitting this. Everyone had cringed away from him on the bus on the way back, like he had a communicable disease (when that was far more likely to be Aiden), and Nicholas had somehow ended up with the urn and sat across the aisle _petting_ it, probably getting greasy fingerprints all over it.

It was nonsense to think that it mattered who touched some broken-off piece of a trophy, but cold showers the next morning and Eugene's sprained wrist had everyone in a rotten mood, and pretty soon everyone was whispering about bad luck and giving Seiji sidelong glances, until he'd been summoned to the clubhouse and ordered to humiliate himself as penance.

Well. He isn't doing it, so they're just going to have to get over it.

*

The first day of his ostracism is, in fact, pleasantly peaceful. Nobody sits with him at breakfast, but nobody ever sits with him at breakfast. Nicholas doesn't distract him in math or Latin with his whispered comments and endless fidgeting. In bio Seiji gets assigned to a project group with two boys who don't do fencing, chess, or debate, and are thus completely oblivious to Old Heads' Dinner gossip. Nobody sits with him at lunch, so he's able to catch up on his history reading without interruption.

Practice is a little frustrating - he's supposed to be paired up with Kally, but Kally is off working with Bobby, who was supposed to be paired up with Aiden - but he does exercises, and drills, and Coach Williams doesn't hassle him or make him run suicides. And then he has dinner, and the rest of the evening to work on his homework, which he does in blissful solitude without any Nicholas disturbances. By the time Nicholas comes back to the room, Seiji has his headphones on and is drifting off to Sibelius.

The second day starts ok. Coach Dmytro is never chatty, but at least he's not treating Seiji any differently. The showers are still cold, and Seiji knows there are supposed to be benefits to that, but he can admit he hopes they fix the boiler soon. Nobody sits with him at breakfast. Nobody talks to him in math.

When he gets to bio, he sits down with his project partners, only to have one of them turn away.

"Turns out that's the guy who broke the Castello boiler," the boy says, and his other partner makes a face.

This is patently unfair - Seiji has never even seen the Castello boiler room - but if that's the rumor the fencing team is spreading, he doesn't know how he can counter it. Nobody is going to believe him over Aiden or Harvard or Kally.

He thinks he catches more dirty looks at lunch, and in his afternoon classes. And then practice is just the opposite, everyone looking past him and through him like he's not even there, except for Coach Williams, who frowns thoughtfully.

He sits down at dinner with some boys he knows from his history class, and they scoot their chairs pointedly away from him.

That night he does his Latin flashcards out loud, and his voice sounds harsh and unused. He keeps expecting Nicholas to comment, to call out from his side of the room, to poke his head around the shower-curtain barrier with a joke or a question, but he isn't there.

Seiji can't say he's enjoying rooming with Nicholas (the noise! the mess! the stupid hair!), but he might have to concede that he's getting used to it. The sudden Nicholas-shaped hole in the room is nearly as jarring a roommate as Nicholas was.

Seiji has his headphones on when Nicholas finally comes in - Brahms tonight - but he's not asleep. He cracks one eyelid open just enough to see Nicholas standing and looking at him for a long moment, before he turns and retreats to his own side of the curtain. Seiji can't hear what he does over there, over the violin and orchestra in his ears, but he can see the moving shadow Nicholas casts in the light of his nightlight.

The third day, Seiji cracks enough to ask Coach Dmytro for advice.

"So they believe in luck," Dmytro says. "Do you?"

"Of course not."

Dmytro shrugs. "Then let them be wrong."

What can Seiji say to that? It would be childish to whine that he's lonely, that he misses Kally saying hi in the cafeteria and Harvard asking how his classes were and Nicholas pestering him at all hours. He's obviously not going to tell Dmytro he had a dream last night that was just Nicholas listening to him while they walked down an endless hallway. He doesn't know what they were talking about, in the dream, but Nicholas had been smiling, and, well. Sometimes in dreams there are emotions just sort of assigned to things. These weren't emotions that would ever happen, on either side, but in the dream they had been mutual, and nice.

In real life Seiji showers - still cold - and eats breakfast - still alone - and plods through his day. He's started to feel weirdly grateful when his teachers call on him, like, at least they'll still talk to him. It's ridiculous - he's spent weeks alone, sometimes, just him and Dmytro and the housekeeper - and it hasn't hurt like this.

*

Admitting it hurts is a huge mistake. Seiji can feel his eyes start to prickle when he looks over at the fencing table at lunch. He loses ten minutes of English class looking at Nicholas's ear and the back of his neck, thinking of how just a few days ago he never stopped turning around and catching Seiji's eye.

He tried to get a grip. He visualizes his fencing mask, puts it on mentally, tells himself that nothing can touch him, and his face is just an unreadable oval. He's in a safe enclosed space, his own bubble, he should be fine. But he isn't.

It should be nice, in the locker room, nobody heckling him, no snide comments, no threats, no pointless challenges, but it's awful. Seiji hates losing, and it's like losing, over and over, a match he used to not even realize he was fencing. It's like being stuck in a losing match that just won't end.

It doesn't make him feel any better that nobody else seems to be having a good practice either. Everyone's electronics keep glitching, everyone's footwork is off. Seiji usually loves the sounds of fencing practice - the clash of blades, the squeak of shoes on the pistes, it's the sound of where he belongs - but today it's all curse words and fumbling.

The last straw is when Tanner's épée breaks. Seiji doesn't see it happen, but there's a wrongish noise and a sudden yell of "shit!" across the room, and everyone abandoning what they're doing to come see.

"If Nicholas wasn't so _fast_ ," he hears Bobby say, high and worried.

Seiji doesn't decide to abandon his drill, but he finds himself walking towards the commotion, until he can see his roommate for himself. Nicholas has his mask off and looks distinctly white in the face.

"Okay," Coach Williams says, voice cutting over the babble, "We're going to wrap up practice early today. Everyone go clean up. Tanner, Nicholas, a moment."

Seiji watches her speak to them quietly - probably double-checking that neither of them had been injured - and then realizes that most of the room has switched from looking at Tanner and Nicholas to looking at him. They're a mass of narrowed eyes and hostile mouths, and Seiji gathers up his things and goes back to Castello without changing anything but his shoes.

Back in the room, he makes himself change and stow his gear properly, and then sits on the bed, staring at nothing. Fencing is a very safe sport, compared to most other sports, but broken blades have killed people. Another freak accident like everything else, obviously, and his supposed curse is going to get blamed, and he's not even welcome to go check that his own roommate is okay.

For the first time, it occurs to him that maybe this isn't going to blow over; maybe his Kings Row experiment has failed, and he's going to have to transfer to Exton after all, or somewhere else. It will be too late for him to join a team, and his whole year of fencing will be thrown off course, or he'll be given special treatment and someone else will get displaced and there'll be a whole new cycle of resentment.

And he'll have some new roommate, who will probably be annoying in some totally new way, and whose hair won't be nearly as stupid - 

The owner of the stupid hair comes in at just that moment, ducking through the doorway and passing to his own side of the room before Seiji can make out much of his physical or emotional condition. There's the whump of Nicholas dropping his bag, and the creak of bedsprings, and then they just sit there, silently.

Seiji is just about to flee to the library, where he can be ignored en masse instead of one-on-one, when Nicholas yanks the shower curtain aside.

"Okay, this is stupid," Nicholas says. "I'm not supposed to even get to say 'damn, that was crazy at practice today', and then you can tell me some calming statistic or something? We need to fix this, because I'm done with this. I miss you. Do you think we could transfer the curse to me?"

It's more words than anyone has said to Seiji in days, and at first he just blinks. The word "transfer" is like an echo from his thoughts about changing schools, and it takes him a moment to understand what Nicholas is talking about.

"I know you don't want to do the cursebreaking thing, but I was thinking, _I_ wouldn't mind. It's not like it's dangerous or gross or embarrassing. We tell everyone I have the curse now, I get rid of it, everyone can stop being dicks."

"Not embarrassing?" Seiji says, in disbelief.

"Ok, I hear that it would be for you," Nicholas says easily. "But I've done much dumber shit in my life." He grins at Seiji. "Come on, you don't think I've developed a higher tolerance for feeling like an idiot?"

His grin hits Seiji like a bucket of warm water, like something that leaves him flushed and off-balance. Three days of shunning, and now Nicholas's smile is overwhelming.

"Why would you do that," Seiji says. "I would think bad luck is the last thing you need." He means it as a jab, reminding Nicholas who's better than whom around here, but it comes out sounding genuinely curious.

Nicholas scoffs. "I don't actually believe in bad luck," he says. "I mean,  
we weren't all born on a silver platter, I guess there's luck in, like, access, or who you get matched up with, but if I lose, or win, that's not luck, that's just how well I fence." He shrugs. "Superstitions can't change anything but your mindset, and if I know I've been working hard, I'm not going to let some fluke bullshit psych me out."

"Yes!" Seiji says, relieved to finally hear someone agree with him. He leans forward. "Maybe some sports have an element of chance, but fencing is about skill, and skill is mostly practice. Put in the time! Do the work! Own your outcomes!"

"Right!" Nicholas says. For a moment, their faces are mirrors. Then Nicholas leans back. "But I think Harvard believes," he says. "And I know Tanner and Bobby do. We just need to play along so we can all get back to business. So let's give me the curse and we can get this done tonight."

"How am I supposed to give you something that doesn't exist," Seiji says, pointing out this minor flaw in Nicholas's logic.

"Yeah, you won't sound at all convincing if we just claim we did it," Nicholas says. He sounds almost affectionate. "So, what I was thinking is, you got the curse in the first place by touching the handles, right? So, the curse is in your hands, in particular. So maybe if you touch my hands, it transfers?" By the end of this suggestion, he's looking almost 90 degrees away from Seiji, and is faintly pink.

"So I just..." Seiji says, lifting his hands tentatively. "Like that?" He makes a sudden tapping strike onto the backs of Nicholas's hands. Nicholas jumps a little.

"If there was a curse, I don't think that would do it," Nicholas says. He's definitely pink. Seiji tries to tap him again, but he whips his hands away too quickly for Seiji to connect. "No, look. What if we, like, set a timer."

"I suppose that would show we were taking it seriously," Seiji says. Without really thinking about it, he gets out his phone and taps through to his timer app. "Fifteen minutes?" It's the current setting. He feels borne along by the Nicholas current, like all he has to do is keep up, and he'll be out of this curse hell.

"Oh, um," Nicholas says. "Sure."

He sits down next to Seiji on Seiji's bed, and then seems to realize that he wasn't invited. "This okay?"

"It's fine," Seiji says. "Ready?"

"I'm - go for it," Nicholas says, holding out his hands. Seiji hits the start button on his phone, and takes Nicholas's hands.

It takes him about five seconds to realize that he is now _holding Nicholas's hands_ , and has suggested that they keep this up for _fifteen minutes_. Seiji would very much like to glare at his thirty-seconds-ago past self. What the hell was he thinking? He hadn't been thinking, obviously. He had been thinking he could sit with the fencing team at dinner. He had been thinking that Nicholas was swooping in and fixing what he had started to think was an unfixable situation, and it was so good to have someone looking at him again.

Nicholas probably doesn't think there's anything uncomfortable about this. He touches people casually all the time, Seiji's seen it. Seiji risks a quick look up from their hands - Nicholas looks blank, like his mind might be somewhere else entirely, doing Latin vocab or rehashing a fencing match for all Seiji knows.

Seiji should probably do that. Teneo, tenes, tenet. Unfortunately his entire body is yelling about the situation at the end of his arms, this foreign and overpowering sensation of holding someone's hands, and mental focus is not happening.

Nicholas's hands are warm. Seiji is trying to hold very still, he's not going to add to the awkwardness of this situation with unnecessary movement, but he can feel the edges of Nicholas's calluses on his fingers.

He realizes he's been holding his breath, and lets it out slowly. It sounds loud in the quiet room. How long has it been?

"Okay, my back really itches," Nicholas says. Seiji's hands tighten on his automatically, before he can pull them away.

"I'm not starting over," Seiji says quickly. "You'll just have to cope."

"Fine," Nicholas says. "Then you have to talk to me to distract me. Tell me something."

"You've been pronating your back foot," Seiji tells him.

"Not like that," Nicholas says, rolling his eyes. "Although, thank you. Tell me something... I don't know, tell me something I don't know about you."

"You don't know anything about me," Seiji says automatically.

"Right, so it should be easy!" Another one of those sunrise grins. He shifts his hands a little in Seiji's grasp.

Seiji thinks. "You tell me something," he suggests.

"Ok, um," Nicholas says. "I told everyone I was fine, but that was actually fucking scary, when Tanner's blade broke? Way too close."

Seiji's hands squeeze again, like a reflex, like he can ground Nicholas safely in the moment just by holding him here.

"I've never had that happen," he says.

"No old worn-out gear for you," Nicholas says. Seiji nods, and then, thinking for a moment, chuckles.

"What?"

"When I was little," Seiji starts. He hasn't thought about this in years. "When I was little, my mother still had this idea of wanting me to be well-rounded, so besides fencing, I did all these other classes. Only... I always thought about fencing. So, I was supposed to be learning the violin, but I always ended up sword fighting with the bow, and I broke my bow more than once doing it, until she gave up. The same thing happened with Japanese classes, they tried to teach us calligraphy and I would fence with the brush."

"Oh my god," Nicholas says.

Seiji looks up.

"That's adorable," Nicholas says. "Little baby Seiji, oh my god. I used to do it with wrapping paper tubes," he says. "Or, like, the toilet plunger. I got in so much trouble that time."

"That's disgusting," Seiji says.

Nicholas shrugs, without moving his hands. "Yeah, kids are gross."

"I was never gross," Seiji assures him.

Nicholas laughs. He's still a little pink, and one of his thumbs has started tracing a small absent-minded circle on the back of Seiji's hand. The hand-holding situation has become less alarming as it's gone on, as Seiji has relaxed into it, but it's also gotten more intense, in strange ways. Seiji feels _safe_ , it's the word that comes immediately to mind, like Nicholas's hands are between him and the entire rest of the world. He remembers trying to visualize his mask - just earlier that afternoon, the day has been endless - but this is the real thing, a bubble where there's just the two of them, and all the awfulness of being ostracized is already far away, even before they've officially broken the curse.

Seiji shifts his hold on Nicholas's left hand, interlacing their fingers.

He hears Nicholas take a breath. Nicholas's left hand, Seiji's right, their fencing hands. Their calluses catch on each other. Nicholas's nails are very short, but very clean. He smells like soap and deodorant and his stupid hair is still slightly damp, making it slightly less stupid than usual.

If they weren't holding hands, Seiji could touch his hair and find out if the top part is really as soft as it's always looked, if the long and short parts feel as different to the touch as they seem.

Nicholas's restless thumb is making circles on Seiji's palm. Every time it goes around it's like a wave through Seiji, like something building and transforming.

"Hey," Nicholas says softly. "I missed you."

He has a surprising number of eyelashes. Way more eyelash than Seiji would have thought. He's looking right at Seiji, intently. A challenge. No, not a challenge at all - it's always been a challenge when Nicholas looked at him before. This is an offer.

Seiji doesn't do this. He doesn't let people hold his hands like they're something important. He definitely doesn't let anyone else into his personal space; that's how you get colds, _interpersonal contact_ , and fencing with a cold is miserable.

Nicholas is his roommate. His messy, messy roommate. Seiji probably has all of his germs already anyways.

He leans in halfway, right over their joined hands, and Nicholas meets him right there, kissing him slowly and carefully.

Kissing is very bizarre - someone else's mouth, on your mouth - and also feels like a thousand little hits running up the back of Seiji's neck, like the scoring light going off again and again and again. He never wants to stop. He wants to catalogue all the parts of Nicholas's mouth, his upper lip, his lower lip, his chin, which he keeps bumping into. Maybe good luck does exist, because this must be what it feels like, contact so benevolent he'll carry it with him like an aura after he lets go.

There's a sudden shrill beeping.

"Oh thank god," Nicholas mutters into his mouth, and lets go of his hands. Before Seiji can react to that, Nicholas's hands are on the sides of his face, steadying and angling his head, and Nicholas is kissing him again, coaxing his mouth open, shocking him with heat.

Seiji has two free hands, and implicit permission to touch back, he thinks. Nicholas's hair is amazingly fluffy.

"Okay," Nicholas says, breaking away after a few more minutes of that. Maybe more. Seiji's time sense has gone as glitchy as the salle electronics. "If we go get everyone now, we can make it to the clubhouse and do the thing and still get back in time for dinner."

Seiji's face feels cold without Nicholas impersonating his fencing mask. Was this a one-time thing? A cursebreaking, a pity kiss?

"I would definitely do this again," Nicholas adds. "Any time. As often as possible." He smiles at Seiji hopefully, and a little nervously.

"I suppose that might be possible," Seiji says loftily, and is pleased to see Nicholas grin, understanding what he really means.

"And I might as well play along with this ritual," Seiji adds, surprising them both. It doesn't seem so unbearable now. "I'm sure that would reassure everyone the most."

*

The cursebreaking is anti-climactic, after that. Nicholas rounds everyone up and they climb the wall and cross the stream. Harvard is a little surprised when Nicholas tells him they both need to get rid of the curse - Nicholas doesn't end up explaining exactly how they'd tried to transfer it, just that they were both going to do it because they were roommates - but he has enough supplies for both of them.

"Okay," Nicholas says, holding up his very ordinary two-inch nail. "So all I have to do is rub this around and throw it in the stream, and that's it?"

"Cold iron and running water," Tanner confirms. "And you have to say you're putting your bad luck into the nail, that's important."

Seiji is pretty sure the nails are galvanized steel, but if that's close enough to iron for everyone's purposes, he's not going to argue.

He and Nicholas look at each other, trying not to laugh.

"I put my bad luck into this nail," they recite. Nicholas starts running his nail down his arms and legs; Tanner had said over the clothes was fine.

Seiji feels about as stupid tracing his body with random hardware as he had thought he would, but he tries to focus on Nicholas and follow along. Everywhere Nicholas touches is a part of his body where he could be touched; that's unexpectedly compelling.

Nicholas, catching Seiji watching him, sticks his hand with the nail down into his waistband, and smirks. Seiji rolls his eyes.

"Okay," he says, dramatically bringing his nail to his face, like a tiny salute. "Good enough?"

Aiden is openly laughing at them, but Tanner looks satisfied. "To the stream!"

They troop out, and Seiji and Nicholas toss their nails into the stream, where they plunk and vanish.

"Well," Harvard says, "That's that. Please do not touch any mysterious objects in the future without asking first."

They cross back to the school grounds. Seiji sits right between Nicholas and Kally at dinner, and when everyone else sees that he's been accepted back into the fencing team fold, the communal ill-will evaporates like it never existed. His bio partners stop by the fencing table and plan with him to meet up in the library later and catch up on their project.

Before they get up from dinner, Nicholas finds Seiji's hand under the table, tracing something onto the back of his hand with a fingertip. Seiji can't tell what, but that's okay. He can ask him to repeat it later, as many times as he needs to figure it out, or possibly more.

*

There's hot water in the showers in the morning.


End file.
